“After the experience of Mosaicoon, what I wanted to do was to try to understand what the Italian start-up vocation is,” is how Ugo Parodi Giusino begins when he tells Startupbusiness about the launch of Magnisi Venture, the new investment vehicle that is part of the Magnisi holding that has already been operational for some time and already has 10 participations. “The basis of this project is precisely to support the development of innovative companies that are able to leverage the strong identities that we have as Europeans, Italians and also Sicilians. Sicily is the home of Giusino and also of his partner in the Magnisi Venture project Giuseppe Tomasello who, after founding the startup Edugo, sold it to Docebo of which he is still vice-president AI and lives in Dubai.
The two founders therefore reasoned that there can also be a startup-friendly ecosystem in Sicily that can flourish further thanks to remote work and the fact that connections with the large Mediterranean island are increasingly easy. “Furthermore, we are developing a programme that starts in Sicily but also develops elsewhere, and this elsewhere starts in Dubai, thus creating a bridge between the Mediterranean and one of the areas of the world where business growth is formidable.”
The vehicle takes on the venture studio model with a co-founder approach, thus working alongside founders who have good ideas and good skills and need a partner to support and facilitate their development: “to be as effective as possible we decided to do early-stage investments in a very light way, without the typical clauses that VCs apply, for example, and with minority percentages between 10 and 25 per cent, and we decided to focus on start-ups that innovate with software and artificial intelligence in high-impact sectors such as agrifood, social, blue economy and green economy’. Il programma prevede che le startup abbiamo il loro quartiere generale in Sicilia e che diventino protagoniste di una fase di accelerazione che si sviluppa per un mese sempre in Sicilia, nel nuovo spazio che ha sede a Palermo in piazza Politeama, e per un altro mese a Dubai.
“With Giuseppe we are definitely complementary, I deal more with the business aspects and the management of the subsidiaries while he is involved in the aspects of scalability and is also developing an artificial intelligence-based tool that will help entrepreneurs in this process’. The new vehicle, named after the Magnisi peninsula near Syracuse and cradle of the Thapsos culture developed during the Bronze Age , is therefore proposed as a tool to support impact innovation, which, in the vision of the founders (pictured), is the one that most characterises the way innovation is identified in Italy and Europe, and as a vehicle that facilitates not only the growth of companies with potential, but also of the Sicilian territory, which has already demonstrated several times recently that it is attractive to start-ups and innovation, as for example in October 2024 when the city of Palermo hosted the first edition of the Mediterranean Startup World Cup.
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